The Diamond Age A Future History
by John Fiala
Summary: It is the far, far future. Earth's children have left their homeworld and forgotten it. History has come and gone, and magic has been forgotten. But it has not been gone for good. A young girl on a farming world has her life changed when a piece of th


the Diamond Age  
  
A Sailor Moon Fanfic  
  
By John Fiala  
  
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Although using characters and ideas from Sailor Moon, this work is not meant to threaten the ownership or any other aspect of the legitimate owner's rights to Sailor Moon. It is a work of fiction and of admiration.  
  
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The crops were hard to tend this season. The wilt-weeds are hardly wilting, their rough edges cutting into Bab's hands. The crystags were fragile, and tended to explode into tiny fragments if squeezed with even a little too much force. And the less said about the apples, the better.  
  
Bab sat near the top of her favorite tree, staring up into the afternoon sky. Alf and Delle were high in the sky, and in a few hours Bab, the moon she was named for, would peak over the horizon and climb into view in much the same way that Bab would in the morning - or so her father joked.   
  
Bab was nearly sixteen. She was pretty short for a grounder, her 5' 3" frame filling out from years of healthy eating and more healthy excersize. Her green hair blew about in the breeze, and Babs felt a slight twitch as a branch blew in the wind and let a dying sunbeam strike it. She'd grown up on a simple farming world, but she still knew about the Five Lights of the old Imperium, about the star-routes, and about the gathering possibilities of war.  
  
She also knew she didn't want to be a farmer. She sighed as she noticed a blinking light in the sky.  
  
This time of night, none of Piper's two statillites would be in that part of the sky, so it was probably the visiting merchanter up there. Bab closed her eyes and dreamed, picturing the craft in her head, imaginging herself as the captain, sending it off to the market hub of Del-Five.  
  
A scream tore the air, and Bab jumped into the air, grabbing for a branch and swinging to the ground, wide-eyed. She listened to the snapping and breaking of trees as something crash-landed into the forest behind her. The final bang was all the louder for the silence that followed, a silence filled soon with the crackle of flame.  
  
"Everyone will have heard that," she said to herself. "Who was that?"   
  
The flight down had been too smooth, too level for it to have been a rock, she thought, and as she tried to follow the nasty scar burned into the wood, she could see that there hadn't been much breakup during the crash. There were occasionall scraps of metal as she went, and she smiled. Who bothered to build a spacecraft out of metal? She looked around as she went, a little surprised at how little fire there was after such an event. Shouldn't this all be on fire now?  
  
The final hit of the craft must have been bad, because the capsule was cracked open. Hearing a hiss from the jagged edges, Bab climbed up on a surviving stump and peered down into the vessel. And found a corpse.  
  
Whoever had been in the craft had been dead a long time. Mummified, the skin stretching tight over bones, it looked to have been a woman. Bab whistled. "How old are you?" she wondered, and jumped back a meter when the flying tomb cracked open. She walked up to the foot of it, and looked in, only then noticing a thin object laying in the mummy's open hand.   
  
It shone...  
  
She couldn't move her eyes off of it. It was so pretty... so very pretty. She leaned in, and slipped. She flinched as she landed against the hot metal, ready to scream in pain - but the metal was somehow cool to the touch now. She looked up again, and was captivated by the stick. Reaching out, she picked it up, held it in her hand.  
  
FOOM!  
  
Bab screamed as she was suddenly surrounded by fire, the forest so cool before catching fire like it should have. Blindly running, she managed to escape the fire somehow, and watched it with her fellow villagers as it burned out, destroying all of the capsule's contents.  
  
"Whoa. Good thing that didn't land in the fields," said Franx. He flexed his muscles a little, well aware that many of the mariageable boys and girls were watching him. He flexed again.  
  
Rory rolled her eyes. "Yes, yes, now we get to pick more wiltweed. I'm tremblign with anticipation." She flashed a green at Bab, and then frowned as she saw her friend staring at the forest. "What's wrong, oh queen of beauty?"   
  
Bab shook her head. "What?"  
  
Rory took Bab's hand. "You okay? You're orbiting on me."  
  
"I," Bab started, and shook her head. "I'm just tired." She kissed Rory's cheek, and waved as she headed back home. Soon enough she was wrapped up in her sheets, and closed her eyes to sleep.  
  
--  
  
--  
  
She stood on a dirt street. No, it wasn't dirt, it was some sort of odd black stones, all glued together. Bab badly wanted to bend over and look at it, but she couldn't. Instead she was watching a battle. Several girls in skimpy outfits were jumping around and using some sort of concealed blasters to batter another group of girls in pale pink skin and leafy clothes. Babs laughed at the sight - pink skin was so old her parents didn't mind it.  
  
But the intricately coreographed dance stuck in her dream - she would see it from one angle, then another, sometimes close, sometimes far away. The girls' blasters were impossible to see at any angle, and the pink team were slowly cut down by them, although they were able to do some impressive damage with their claws. Luckily, the first team seemed to heal as they fought, obviously having better nan than their opponents.  
  
And then she was somewhere else. It was like a temple, only smaller, and with a roof, and there was a fire burning between her and - someone else. Whoever the other person was, she spoke, the language rough and unfamiliar to her.  
  
"Huh?" Bab said.  
  
The other woman paused. She tried again, a language still unfamiliar, but less barbaric-sounding.  
  
"No, I'm sorry," Bab replied.  
  
"Can you understand me?"  
  
Bab smiled. "Yes, yes. Who are you?"  
  
"I'm your Sensei." The last word was barbaric, but apparently was too important to the girl to be spoken properly.   
  
Bab sighed. "What?"  
  
"Your teacher." The other one said, annoyed.  
  
Bab shrugged. "Don't you have a name?"  
  
"Sensei."  
  
Bab would have asked again, except then the fire died down... and she saw she was talking to the mummy from the ship. She screamed, and woke herself up.  
  
--  
  
--  
  
The next day was pretty light. There was too much smoke in the air to harvest properly, so after temple lessons, the teens were let free for their own amusement. Since they'd been told to stay away from the fire, they were naturally wandering on the edge of the woods, trying to see if they could find any metal for souveniers, or to sell to the merchants.  
  
"You saw it?" Roxy said quietly as they sat next to a stream that escaped the wood.  
  
"Yes. It stopped burning, and so I followed it into the woods. There was this metal capsule, and in it was a dead woman." And a stick, she meant to say, but somehow didn't.  
  
"But it burned all night!" Roxy said.  
  
Bab nodded. "I know! Once I saw her... well, it suddenly all burst up again! I'm lucky to be alive!"   
  
As Roxy nodded and looked away, Bab could tell her friend wasn't sure if she was telling the truth. She frowned, trying to figure out why she couldn't tell her best friend about the stick she had found.  
  
Before she could, screams burst out from their left. They jumped to their feet, and ran down the path until they saw it. It was a Jurax, a seven-foot tall creature with scales and claws. Usually they were very sedate, using their claws to dig up roots, but this one had been maddened by the fire and was striking at anything it would find. The teens scattered, but the Jurax had three of them trapped, and snapped its jaws at them as it advanced.  
  
Bab stepped away, into the darkness of a ticket, her legs moving on their own. She pulled the stick out, old metal shining in the scant light as she held it over her head for reasons she couldn't understand.  
  
She spoke something in the barbaric tongue. And dreamed of fire.  
  
--  
  
--  
  
She was laying on the grass when Roxy woke her up by the simple expedient of dumping a shell of water on her head. She shrieked as she sat up. "Hey!"  
  
Roxy laughed, dropping the shell. "Sorry - had to make sure you were still alive. What happened to you? You were right behind me, and then I saw the Jurax, and...  
  
Bab gasped. "Those? Are they okay? What happened?"  
  
Roxy gasped, and dropped to her knees. "You didn't see?"  
  
Bab shook her head. "I musta slipped and hit my head," she said, rubbing her scalp. She didn't feel anything, but that didn't mean anything. Her nan may have scrubbed it.  
  
"This woman flew out of the trees," Roxy excitedly said. "She was surrounded by flames - must have been a grav suit, but it was really skimpy. Just a tight tard and a skirt - but she had this black hair past her ass! She hung there in the air, and waved her hand, and I felt this wave of warmth rush past me, towards the Jurax. It must have thought the fire was back, because it immediately broke off towards the forest again. We all cheered, and the woman said something - I don't know what language she thought she was speaking, but I didn't understand it. And then she flew off!" She grinned. "Brice thinks it was one of the merchants, but I don't know - maybe it was something that got loose from the capsule?"  
  
Bab shut her eyes and rubbed her forehead, letting out a moan.  
  
Roxy pressed close, wrapping her arms around her. "Hey, you okay?"  
  
"Ugh. I'm just... weak," she said softly. "Help me home?"  
  
Roxy nodded, pulling Bab to her feet and helping her wend her way home. Once there, she collapsed into bed, staring at the sky. As Roxy had told her story, Bab had seen it - every bit of it - from the flying woman's point of view.  
  
What had happened?  
  
Why?  
  
Almost without realizing it, Bab slipped into sleep.  
  
And awoke in the strange temple, facing a fire, hiding a mummy.  
  
"Good. About time you got here. You've got a lot to learn," the mummy said.  
  
"Who- who are you?"  
  
A pause, and then the mummy replied. "I was once Halla Toi. I was once Rimth, the queen of flame. I was once Hino Rei. I was once the Senshi of Fire."  
  
Bab looked down at herself, seeing that she was dressed, if barely, in white and red. "What?"  
  
The flame parted, and a beautiful black-haired woman looked through it. "I am dead, and long dead, and need to rest. You must be me now. You are now the Senshi of Fire."  
  
Bab couldn't think of anything to say to that.  
  
"You must return to the Crystal Palace and join your fellow senshi to protect the third millenium!" the woman insisted.  
  
This she could react to. She laughed. "The what?"  
  
The woman paused. "The third millenium. Unless I haven't been dead as long as I expected? Is it still the 28th century, then?"  
  
"Century?"  
  
The woman looked at her. "What year is it?" she whispered, her face drawing back as she dried into a whithered husk.  
  
"This is the sixth millenium. The year is 6063."  
  
"What happened to the Crystal Palace?"  
  
"The what?"  
  
"The grand palace that orbits the earth! The center of magic!" The mummy's voice cracked with confusion and worry.  
  
"The what?"  
  
In the moonlight streaming through her room, Bab slept, clutching a slender metal stick in her hand, that seemed to almost glow red in the light. And then she was shadowed by a metallic outline that extended a long, thin blade to a point inches over her throat.  
  
To be continued?   
  
jcfiala523hotmail.com 


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